My best friend runs a 5e game that I'm not a part of. He gave me the starter material to read last year. I'm unsure of how a lot of the system works, but one thing I do remember is that one of the methods they used to fix twinking out various class/race/feat(?)/etc combinations was to center combat around the act of gaining "combat advantage" or forcing someone else into a position of "combat disadvantage." I'm not 100% sure exactly how it works, but the way I remember it being explained to me is that some abilities rely on you having a combat advantage over your opponent to work. The easiest example I can think of to explain combat advantage might be ("might be" in that the example makes sense in my head, but I have no idea if it would actually work with the system) that if you successfully feint against an opponent, you gain combat advantage and you'll therefore be able to use your Bitchin' Cuisinart Death Blade Ability of Pain on him.

I wouldn't be adverse to being a player in a 5e game, but I'd need to borrow my friend's books to read to make sure I wanted to drop the money on my own copies.

No hate for other editions here, but if I invest in any system besides 3.5 D&D it'll be Pathfinder. I usually want to brew my own material for whatever I play, and the Open Gaming License for those systems makes it easier to do that. If I develop for 4e or 5e, I have to stop developing and publishing for 3.5 and Pathfinder.

I'd play, maybe, if these systems have short players' documents to allow people to pick up the system without needing to invest fully. But it's my impression that Wizards now officially prefers that people give them money for that stuff.

Wizards left me cold with the switch from 3.x to 4th. I don't really see 5th edition as an improvement, though I haven't actually played it. I've read a lot about it including play tests and evaluations of the rules, and I'm fairly convinced that it lacks any meaningful substance. You'd be just as well off playing 2nd edition since it tends to all revolve around DM fiat, anyways. With a good GM, you'll have fun, but that's true of any system and certainly not a reason to give this one a try.

Of all the official edition of D&D, 3.x is my favorite. I had a lot of hope for Pathfinder, but they didn't make some very necessary changes in the name of 'backward compatibility', but then they changed a bunch of stuff that didn't need changing so there really isn't any compatibility anyway. At this point, creating a character in Pathfinder is very complex, and I prefer the homebrew system we use in our weekly game (Odyssey).

5e gives a lot of the customization that I've come to expect from a game like 3.5, but balances it much better. The mostly bounded accuracy mechanics and vastly improved magic items no longer mean an extreme series of calculations and bonuses that apply to different circumstances at high level play. The description earlier in this thread about advantage and disadvantage represents exceptions rather than the rule - you use advantage and disadvantage when circumstances are particularly great or tough rather than as a core mechanic.

In addition, the character types live up to the fantasy of the character class more consistently. By way of example, spellcasters cast spells - almost always. You don't see spellcasters pulling out slings and crossbows to preserve spell slots. Instead, they cast magic as part of their fantasy. Despite this fact, they aren't super broken. People have the opportunities to show off and do things very effectively in most circumstances.

If I have any rules qualm, it's with a single feat called "Lucky." I would probably remove that feat from the feat list for any game with epic healing. I might remove that feat from the feat list for standard healing. I probably would leave it for any game with gritty healing. That's probably the only house rule I would make to deviate from RAW.

Something I am having trouble understanding in 5e is scaling enemies. For instance in 3.5 I could easily generate an Orc as a llevel 1 warrior or a 20th level warrior, or adept, or even any player character class of any level. 5e doesn't seem to lend itself to that kind of scaling. An Orc is just an Orc, and acolyte is just an acolyte, a cultist, a commoner, etc.

Recently, a new sourcebook called "Xanathar's Guide to Everything" came out for 5e. The amount of customization still doesn't rival the decade of development of 3.5, but this book is pretty amazing. There wasn't any interest on the archive at the beginning of the year for the 5e game I was running and I deleted it. Is that still the case?

I'm not terribly interested in learning a new rule set at this point. Not that I think 3.5/Pathfinder are the One True Way, or anything. I'm just lazy and I can make the ones I know do whatever I want. The same reasoning informs my relative lack of interest in Warhammer.

I just read a quick review of Xanthar's Guide on the Gaming Den. While I approve of more options generally, making them meaningful is important, too. Otherwise you end up like Pathfinder where you make 20+ decisions just to end up with a +1 to two different skills.

I can't say I'm totally opposed to new systems - I have my own that my friends and I put together that we play live via Google Hangouts on Sundays. That said, I don't really think that 5e offers anything that 3.x doesn't. I'd give it a shot with a compelling game pitch but I'd be playing for the setting not the rules. I feel the same about Warhammer Fantasy. 1d100 roll under is about the worst possible system you could use. I'm playing in a Warhammer 40k game and my tricked out Devestator has a 74% in his Ballistic Skill - these 'Emperor's Chosen' fail in everything more often than they succeed.

Wow, that's a brutal review. I don't agree with the author's assessment. I've run 5e every week since it came out and I'm very happy with Xanthar's. It makes sense to me that each person would have their own take on what they like but I can understand why someone looking "to pay2win [their] character to glory" might be dissatisfied.

The game I want to run is DS9 meets the Blood War. I don't really want to run for a bunch of random folks on the internet. If there are folks interested, I would consider running it here.

Mostly, yeah. There is a war raging on the other side of the portal, and the fixed base of operations is the site of a ton of intrigue and preventative measures from a federation of races (dwarf, elf, hoo-mahn, etc.) to prevent the violence from consuming the prime material. Devils and Demons periodically come through the portal to gain assistance from Primes but the base of operations ensures that no organized violence or armies embroil the Prime in the Blood War itself.

Some follow up news after our previous discussion included a mention of "Xanathar's Guide to Everything" - this new book for 5e is the fastest selling book in the 43 year history of Dungeons and Dragons.

Cronono, WotC always lies to make their sales sound better than they are. They actually go to great lengths to create the illusion that things are better than they are. For example, for the 4th edition PHB, they created several VERY SMALL print runs. Then they made a big deal about how it was already in the 3rd printing in 30 days. Although they said it 'outsold the 3rd edition PHB' it turned out that in a court proceeding they confirmed that the 3rd edition PHB sold millions of copies and the 4th edition sold hundreds of thousands.

The reason I mention it is that puzzling out what they ACTUALLY MEAN is a fun game.

For instance, the first link on that blog links to the Wall Street Journal showing that Xanathar's is the top-selling book in non-fiction for the week ending November 19th. This link is for the list for 11/19. It's not listed.

I've written to the guy at the Journal to see if he can explain it. In any case, it'll be interesting to see.

That's what makes it so interesting. 'Fastest Selling' is a vague metric. In general, it sounds good. If something is the fastest selling we'd expect it to be on track to be the best selling of all time. Of course, that's not the claim they're making.

So it's not the best selling book of all time (otherwise they'd have said that). So what does 'fastest selling' mean? I don't think they're making the claim that there were more pre-orders than for the 4th edition Player's Handbook. It is possible that the claim is based instead on number shipped on the first day - again that would be in keeping with their tendency to make technically true but very misleading marketing statements.

Publisher's Weekly has sales data for the book, and shows 55,000 copies sold in 2017. Based on this week's numbers that implies 45,000 sold last week and 10,000 sold this week.

My best guess is that Mearls is excluding 'core books' because even 4th edition sold more on pre-order.

Edit - I do WANT D&D publishing to be healthy. The fact that The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Come and Get It!: Simple, Scrumptious Recipes for Crazy Busy Lives sold as many copies THIS WEEK as Xantathar's Guide did total (and is currently over 400k units) depresses me. I wish that there weren't 10x more people buying a Cookbook than a D&D book.

The first, second, and third thing to remember is that Mike Mearls is a mendacious douche. Everything he says is very carefully sculpted to deceive. If 5e had surpassed 3rd edition in lifetime sales overall, WotC would be singing it from the rooftops and walking into a gaming store you'd be confronted with James Wyatt's alarming genitalia repeatedly thrusting at your face. It would not be announced in a weirdly punctuated and unsourced twitter response to some dude named "@newbiedm." It just fucking wouldn't. Sales like that of the 5e PHB would necessarily mean expansion materials would be produced and sold for money, which they clearly aren't.

I'm not entirely sure what the angle here is, but there obviously is one because Mike Mearls is a mendacious douche. He could be talking about amazon sales or something even more retarded like the lifetime of the sales period (the 5e PHB has now been on sale for more than two years and it wouldn't surprise me if the other editions stopped making new printings in less than that). But if I had to take a guess as to what the trick is, it would be the commas.

Mearls wrote:

5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime

"Lifetime" only necessarily applies to the 4th edition PHB, which of course was a dog with fleas. As written, he could claim in court that he was comparing the lifetime 5e sales with the current 3e sales and the lifetime 4e sales. Which would be an apples to rutabagas comparison, but I don't see how you claim that 5e outsold 3e without one.

-Frank

5th edition is doing decently well in terms of making money because they don't have a staff and basically aren't making product. The licensing alone should be enough to make this the most 'profitable' era of D&D if you measure it by dividing sales by costs. But if they were really selling product, you'd fully expect them to release more product.

Since they don't, I'm suspicious of their claims. It certainly doesn't MATTER whether it's selling a lot or not - as long as people are enjoying their games it doesn't matter whether you're the only one playing it or you're in the company of millions. But all they have are claims that appear counterfactual given without any supporting evidence - and what evidence can be found appears to contradict it.

Also, Trollman needs to be put against a wall and shot for perpetuating the idea that commas are grammatically significant when used in lists. The basis of his diatribe against Mearls is his own shitty understanding of how the Oxford Comma works.

The reason for my skepticism is that Mike Mearls has been a proven liar. When he makes a claim that sounds dubious, I like to check it out as well as I can. I do the same thing whenever the president says anything.

Frank Trollman's real name is Frank Trollman. I don't think that's a reason to assume that he's trolling. He is a credited game designer for Shadowrun (See Street Magic, 2006).

Now, I know that 3.0 sold around 200,000 Player's Handbooks each year and that the 3.5 edition outsold it. I also know that in the roughly 8 years that 3rd edition was supported, there were more than 50 official WotC books. I know that because that's how many I have on my shelf and I don't have very many Eberron or Forgotten Realms books. I'd have no trouble believing that there were another 20 or so of those that I don't have. We're talking a print schedule that isn't far off from one major hardback book every month. Let's say 10/year. For 5th edition, Xanathar's Guide is the first book to offer additional rules content since the PHB/DMG/MM released three years ago. If you count hardback adventures (which I didn't for 3.x) we're talking about 1 major release per year. For an edition that's selling really well, it begs the question: why isn't more content being released?

Either WotC is refusing to release more product that they're confident that they can sell at a profit (which is unusual for businesses in general) or they're not confident that they can sell it which at least implies that they're overstating their sales. Since I work for a company, I absolutely do understand why people would try to tell 'a good story'. If we can't say 'we're number 1' we say 'we're number one in field X'. If the field is small enough, the statement isn't particularly meaningful, even if it is true.

Now, I fully expect that 3rd edition and/or 3.5 weren't the 'fastest selling' editions because there were probably fewer pre-orders. 4th edition had a large number of pre-orders and they made a big deal about how they sold through the first print-run (which was tiny) so fast so they could (truthfully) claim they were on their 3rd printing in the first year. I think you would agree that a claim 'we're on our 3rd print run' is designed to create the appearance of great success. You wouldn't expect it to me 'we're selling our 3rd book', but if each print run were only one book, it could literally be true. So when they make a vague statement, I assume it is 'literally true', but I want to verify whether there is another way that it could be taken that is consistent with my observation. I certainly understand that I'm not representative, but I personally know more than 100 people that purchases a 3.5 PHB and I know fewer than 10 people that have purchases a 5th edition PHB.

I do think that 5th edition is having a bit of a Renaissance, propelled by 80s nostalgia as exhibited by Stranger Things. A successful 5th edition is a good thing - bringing more players into the hobby is important! I definitely perceive 5th edition to be a huge improvement over 4th edition, but I'm skeptical that it has performed better than 3rd. I simply can't find enough evidence to support it.

Since 4th edition 'sold through' it's first print run so quickly based on strong preorders, I find it hard to believe that a 'secondary' book sold faster. I would believe that the 4th edition PHB was the 'fastest selling' book on release, and ultimately that's a meaningless metric because 4th edition is crap. I really would like to know how 4th edition PHB sales measure against Xanathar's Guide, but WotC doesn't release sales numbers for D&D. What evidence I can find doesn't support the story they're telling, or at least not in a meaningful way. So yes, without corroboration, I assume that they're using 'marketing speak' to make things sound better than they are. That is something I'm familiar with and something I've seen them do. I can even think of reasons why they would want to.

The reason for my skepticism is that Mike Mearls has been a proven liar. When he makes a claim that sounds dubious, I like to check it out as well as I can. I do the same thing whenever the president says anything.

I'll come back to this.

Quote:

Frank Trollman's real name is Frank Trollman. I don't think that's a reason to assume that he's trolling. He is a credited game designer for Shadowrun (See Street Magic, 2006).

I'm aware that it's his real name. Mr. Trollman rage-quit his job on the Shadowrun supplement in question because people persistently disagreed with him and refused to kowtow to his opinions, and since then he has pretty much made his career out of being loudly displeased by everything that happens in the gaming world.

He's Lord High Neckbeard, King of Trolls, and I don't have any time for him. A quick perusal of his message boards shows little except a bunch of people with nothing more important in their lives than to complain about how awful WotC is and how stupid people are for liking anything that came after 3.5 (which they consider awful, too, lest anyone accuse them of being positive about something).

Just for example, a scan of the first page of his "In My Humble Opinion" forum shows gems like "D&D 5e has failed," "Pathfinder Is Still Bad," "Angry Blind Readthrough: Xanathar's Guide to Everything," and "What are the biggest things DnD 5e needs to be passable?" That is to say that, fully 8% of the first page of that specific forum is devoted to shitting on things the community doesn't like and the foolish people who like those things.

Elsewhere Trollman also has no idea how to have a polite disagreement with someone, and his coterie of sycophants over at the Gaming Den exhibits everything that I've come to like least about the gaming community. The only thing I can say for them is that they don't appear to the kind of racist, misogynistic assholes who were behind Puppygate. That's far from being praise, mind.

Suffice it to say that yes, I consider the man a gigantic troll based on how he behaves. He never has anything good to say about anyone or anything, and I have no time for him. The fact that he dislikes Mearls is basically a character endorsement from my perspective.

[snip]

Quote:

Now, I know that 3.0 sold around 200,000 Player's Handbooks each year and that the 3.5 edition outsold it.

The ONLY hard claim that I have seen out of Mearls or anyone else at WotC is that the 5e PHB outsold the 3.0e, 3.5e and 4e PHBs. I don't find that unbelievable, because the 5e PHB was in Amazon's top 100 books sold for a solid YEAR after it was released.

I'm having some trouble turning up information about how well it was selling after that point. But to date, Amazon has sold somewhat more than 171,000 units all on its own. There's no telling for sure how many copies have gone out through other outlets, but Amazon is estimated to account for 25% to 30% of all hardcover sales in the USA. So let's go ahead and say the total is 570,000 copies or so, to date, but it could be as many as 680,000 copies. Again, just in the USA. Worldwide, it could be somewhat more than that.

So assuming your 200,000 copies/year figures are accurate, 5e's PHB is about on track with 3.0/3.5, and it may well be beating them, assuming that Amazon isn't taking a much larger than usual chunk of the sales for this title (which I don't think it is; I see the 5e PHB every time I walk into a bookstore).

Currently, it's selling at #116 overall on Amazon, nearly three years after release. That's . . . really considerable, even if you allow for the likelihood that it's getting a bump from the release of Xanatar's.

Seriously, though, Trollman's been banned from literally everyplace he's ever gone. His name is a happy accident, and The Gaming Den is a festering sore that eggs him on in behavior that has made him persona non grata at Paizo, ENWorld, RPG.net, and quite a few other spots.

I'm probably missing some from the list because I don't maintain a presence on any of them; the tabletop RPG community hasn't gotten any more polite since I left the WotC boards back in 2004 or so, and I've gotten progressively less interested in arguing with social maladroits.

No. I was going to ask for examples, but I was trying to think of a way to do it that would not make me seem to be calling DDMW a liar. Because I like him and respect him, and I don't think he's lying, and I don't want to make this discussion rancorous.

So far, I've got only the Wrath of Frank and DDMW's word to say that he's lied a bunch, but no actual enumeration of things Mearls has lied about, other than maybe this statement of his about the relative sales of 3e/3.5e/4e versus 5e. But that looks dubious to me; my extrapolation from Amazon's sales figures on 5e puts it roughly on par with 3.X, and sales figures are both difficult to verify and difficult to obtain.

And also, I have some degree of nuance in my mind between "lied" and "was repeatedly mistaken." I can totally believe that Mearls and other folks at WotC might have been wrong all over the place, all in good faith. We're not necessarily talking about the Sean Spicer of tabletop RPGs, here.

I'd be willing to entertain an argument that he may not know the difference between facts and fiction. Which would mean that he can't, if you subscribe to a definition of lying that requires deliberate falsehood.

I don't think transitioning to a Trump discussion would be constructive here, although I have a LOT to say about whether he can or cannot parse falsehood from truth, or the possible reasons for him not being able to.

It sounds like 5E is doing ok. If they're gunshy about replicating the breathtaking production schedule from v3.5, good on them. It killed 2E AND 3E, bankrupting TSR and something similar might have happened to WotC had Hasbro not purchased the company. Or maybe not - Magic could have kept them afloat. But it would have been hard for Wizards to justify NOT selling the rights to D&D if they persisted with all that one book a month nonsense.

Too little, too late for me though. I don't regret moving on to Pathfinder. But the prologue in Cronono's game has been fun so far.

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken

Yeah, from what I've been able to tell, 5E is doing just fine, and certainly isn't "failed," whatever the folks at The Gaming Den have to say about it. It may not be to everyone's taste, but that's okay.

4E failed, arguably; I don't see a lot of people still playing it, it didn't appear to get widespread adoption, and it had a short lifetime with relatively low sales throughout. Even in that case, I don't think Hasbro/WotC actually lost money on the deal. But it clearly wasn't the hit that 3.X or 5 have turned out to be.

I think Mike's right in pointing out that 3.5's insanely crowded release schedule didn't do it any favors, especially after the "Races of X" line got started up. I have a lot of Forgotten Realms setting supplements, and a few Eberron books, both because I have run campaigns in both, and because I'm interested in their differing approaches to world building. But most of my interest as a DM who also occasionally got to play was taken up by stuff that would be useful to me without regard to setting: Monster Manual additions, Sandstorm and other terrain-centric material, and stuff like Lords of Madness and Manual of the Planes.

So it doesn't really alarm me that 5E hasn't involved a return to that madness. If anything, I'm really kind of pleased that if I wanted to get into the game, I could do it by purchasing three books. Also, I realize that I'm probably odd for never having played a published, prepared adventure (either as a DM or a player), and that from an objective standpoint the stable of adventures that WotC is putting out would be more immediately useful and enjoyable for groups that aren't into homebrewing.

Given that I STILL can buy new, unused copies of most 3.5 books, I'm not really convinced that WotC is leaving a ton of money on the table by not following the same kind of punishing release schedule that characterized previous editions.

I just wrapped up a campaign that I run on Roll20. I'm starting a new West Marches (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) style game. The setting is another part of The Empire that I'm using for Watchers of the Dawn, where the players are in a "camp" similar to the van der Linde gang from Red Dead Redemption 2. The political situation is very heavily inspired by Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the camp is ostensibly a group of monster hunters a la The Witcher.

In order to keep folks involved, there are different events run over time. By way of example, here's two weeks of schedule (all times Eastern).

Players are not allowed to participate in more than one event per week (Monday - Sunday). For you sticklers to historical game content, the game is run in 5e. We do have a couple of spare subscriptions to D&D Beyond if you don't have the books. The subscriptions have all of the published content. If you're interested, send me a DM.